Author: Christie Williams

The NSU Writing and Communication Center (WCC) participated in the “Sherman’s Golf in the Library” event January 10-12, a fundraiser hosted by the Alvin Sherman Library Circle of Friends. Golfers of all ages had the chance to “tee-off” for fun on the 18-hole miniature golf course where each hole was decorated by a library or campus organization based on a specific children’s book, such as Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax,  E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, or the Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling.

The WCC golf hole was based on Alphabet Under Construction, a children’s book by Denise Fleming, which features a mouse building all the letters of the alphabet out of different materials. The WCC hole featured several handmade letters, including a 7-foot tall capital “L” that guests could “construct” by adding paper bricks to it on which they wrote messages to the library. The hole also featured a mechanical mouse on a ladder pulling on a rope to raise and lower the letter “Y.”

WCC staff, led by WCC faculty coordinator and CAHSS Assistant Professor Dr. Eric Mason, designed and constructed the hole. Dr. Mason said “It was great to partner with the Alvin Sherman Library to provide the community with a fun experience based on children’s books. At the WCC we work daily with writers from all corners of NSU, and an event that recognizes the impact that the texts we write can have on the next generation is a perfect way to remind ourselves why we write.”

The 3-day unique mini golf experience provided NSU faculty, staff, students, and community members the opportunity to connect with different organizations and golf on the 1st and 2nd floors. The event’s host, the not-for-profit organization Circle of Friends for the NSU Alvin Sherman Library, is dedicated to serving the library in its efforts of maintaining its role as the premier research and information technology center, structured for cultural and lifelong learning for the NSU and Broward County community. All proceeds raised from the event were used to help fund early childhood literacy programs, furniture, technology and research materials. The WCC looks forward to participating in the event in upcoming years.

For more information on the Circle of Friends, visit: http://sherman.library.nova.edu/sites/friends/about-the-circle-of-friends/

The NSU-wide Undergraduate Student Journal, Mako has recently been revived with five student-authored and faculty-mentored papers published in a new winter 2020 issue. Halmos College faculty members Aarti Raja, Ph.D. and Santanu De, Ph.D. are serving as Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor, respectively. Oceanographic Campus librarian Keri Baker is overseeing the technical aspects of the online publication.

Faculty and all faculty-led undergraduate student researchers of all fields are encouraged to connect with MAKO to promote this publication.

Ransford Edwards, Ph.D., faculty in the Department of History and Political Science in NSU’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) was a guest speaker for Global Ties Miami Tuesday Talks. His talk was entitled, “Disaster Capitalism in Latin America: Spotlight on Venezuela.”

Edwards’ regional areas of focus are the Caribbean and Latin America. His work appears in Class, Race, and Corporate Power and he has been a reviewer for the journal Disasters. His teaching interests include quantitative research methods, political economy, and political film and fiction. He is the faculty advisor for NSU’s chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha, National Political Science Honor Society.

Last week, Halmos faculty member Vehbi Paksoy, Ph.D. presented a talk entitled, “Tensor Eigenvalue Problems and Modern Medical Imaging”. This talk, part of the Mathematics Colloquium Series hosted by the Halmos College Department of Mathematics discussed Tensors (or hypermatrices) are multidimensional generalization of matrices. Although historically they are studied from the perspective of combinatorics and (hyper)graph theory, recent progress in the subject shows how useful they are in more applied sciences such as physics and medicine.

In this presentation, he introduced a few tensor eigenvalue problems and their application to higher order diffusion tensor imaging such as diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) and higher angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI).